Teeth

Leslie: Have you read the Series of Unfortunate Events? Little Sunny Baudelaire is a baby and her attribute is her teeth, which come in handy in crucial situations. Ellie is like Sunny. When we got her, she had two teeth on top and two on the bottom. I let her bite my finger once, thinking she needed something to soothe tender gums. She bit hard enough that I thought she'd drawn blood. She didn't want to soothe gums, she wanted to try out teeth!

Now she's got two more on top. She bites everything. Our chair has bite marks. Phil's belt is a favorite chew-toy. She bites on a cup so that it cups her lip and nose, with no hands. She bites on the spoon and bobs it up and down with her teeth (again no hands). She's bitten every rail on her crib and on our bed. She scorns soft baby toys, opting for anything hard instead. She sucks her thumb and sometimes so hard that her sharp teeth created a blister on her thumb. We tried to get her to use a pacifier so that her blister could heal. She wasn't so interested, so I thought perhaps if she saw the boys with one, she'd get the idea. Alex gamely volunteerd for binky-duty. Ellie got the idea -- but decided that she prefered the hard plastic end. So when Alex had it in his mouth, she'd grab the other side and pull! If she gets ahold of paper, she rips it to shreds with her teeth. Obliging baby, she's figured out that when she's got paper in her mouth and I am coming purposefully towards her, it is time to offer the wet mass up to me, so she positions it on the tip of her tongue and gives it to me that way.

Earthquake

Leslie: A lot of people have asked me about the earthquake in China. This link to a US government map shows the area that was affected. http://www.earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/pager/events/us/2008ryan/index.html It is sort of lozenge-shaped, and Chongqing, the capital of Ellie's province, is in the "moderate" area. I've not heard of any damage in Chongqing, though they felt the shaking. We were on the 30th floor of a hotel, and one wall of our room was glass, so had we been there, it would have been pretty frightening. But no damage. Ellie's orphanage is to the southeast, up in the mountains. Someone on the Xiushan yahoo group found out that they didn't even feel the shaking, and knew about it only because they lost phone service.

Had Chongqing been closer to the epicenter, I can't even imagine what the death toll would have been. It is an enormous sprawling city, but with the density of New York. Many buildings are 20 or 30 stories. They are lucky it hit where it did, and that the area was lozenge shaped. Enough families have lost their one child.

Naturally, there are orphanages in the areas that have been hit. We don't know any details, but our adoption agency is helping with relief efforts: www.chinesechildren.org .

Ellie at the Zoo

Yesterday Ellie had her first trip to the zoo. She seemed to like the animals, and even looked where Jeremiah was pointing!

Sleepy baby

Ellie likes to sleep with an arm or a leg hanging outside her crib. I keep worrying that she will hurt herself when she turns over in her sleep, but she seems to be used to how to do it. In this one, though, not only did her arm hang out, but her face was mushed up against the bar. You can see that her mouth is pressing on a bar. I feel sure that this is part of orphanage behavior, but I don't really understand it. I've read about "head-banging" and other behaviors that look painful. Babies in institutions do them as "self-stimulating" behaviors. Maybe that is what this is.

Ellie's orphanage

Leslie: We sent a disposable camera to the orphanage in a care package right after we were matched with Ellie. The caretakers took a bunch of pictures, though unfortunately most were taken on the same day. Still, we got a sense of what it was like.

Ellie's orphanage was adopted by a charity, Love without Boundaries, which provided formula and nutrition education. So Ellie's physical needs were satisfied, and she is a healthy weight and height. The nannies clearly cared about the kids and did the best with what they had, but it is pretty grim nonetheless. Her crib was held together with string, and was lashed together with other cribs into a little raft of cribs in a big room. I wonder whether there was central heat, as I look at the building and remember how bundled the babies were. It is also clear that the babies spent a fair amount of waking time in their cribs.

I've no idea why so many of the pictures were taken on the diagonal, but most were.

Ellie's new hat

Such a lady! This is the first hat she didn't immediately pull off.

Ellie's new tricks

Ellie is just a doll. Poor baby has had a second ear infection (but is starting to pull out of it) and has started getting bumps and bruises (including today's shiner!) as she has a chance to explore her world. She's not yet figured out balance, even when sitting and leaning over to grab something.

Her latest new trick is learning to smile. I wonder if smiling is more social than laughing. Most of the time thus far, Ellie has laughed, and the pictures we have are laughing pictures. But in all the photos we had from the orphanage I'd noticed that she never smiled. As we got to know her the last two weeks I've been struck by the fact that she never just smiles, not in response to my smiles, not as a greeting.

Yesterday, she spontaneously started practicing just smiling. She bares her teeth and squints up her eyes. I know it is practice and not "real" because she still doesn't smile in response to anything, or as a greeting. She does it randomly, and often two or three times in a row. She's seen us do it, and is trying it out. She also has tried other facial expressions, but none are as obvious. I had to take about 10 pictures with my slow-shutter digital camera to capture it, but I finally got one! She is utterly hilarious!